25 Mar 2024

From its humble beginnings in 2013 with only five officers, all seconded from related institutions, and reporting entities at that time being mainly just financial banks,  the literacy level on Anti Money Laundering-Combating the Financing Terrorism (AML-CFT) issues being very low, the Financial Intelligence Agency (FIA) has grown in leaps. and bounds.

This is according to its Director General, Ms Bopelokgale Soko during the agency's gala dinner to mark its ten years of existence on Friday in Gaborone.

Ten years later,  FIA has more than 60 officers, the majority of them trained in financial intelligence and related disciplines, and reporting entities have increased both in diversity and numbers, she said.

Ms Soko said that the number or reports submitted by reporting entities have also continued to increase mainly due to intensive awareness campaigns undertaken over the years.

This growth was unavoidable as the country needed to build adequate capacity to deal with the expanding scope of the Financial Assistance Task Force (FATF) standards, while at the same time ensuring safety and integrity of the financial system and the broader economy, she said.

Ms Soko said the operations of FIA relied heavily on strategic partnerships both locally and internationally, hence focus on building such for the last ten years.

She said such partnerships were handy in dealing with cross-border money laundering cases and sharing of intelligence with other members.

The partnership, she highlighted, also played its most important part when Botswana was grey listed as all involved played a part in enduring the delisting within two years.

She also applauded reporting entities and development partners who assisted the country even to date, in building robust compliance measures.

Let me also appreciate the past leadership of the FIA for laying a strong foundation for the agency, which made the job for us, the current leadership easier, she said.

As the agency marked a decade of existence, there was a need to renew pledges of continued fighting to ensure that the AML-CFT regime in the country remained  robust enough to fight all illicit financial activities, Ms Soko said. ENDs.